Brad Parks - Eyes of the Innocent

Mi-Ryong giggled at me.

“She has a crush on yooouuuu,” Tommy taunted.

Ignoring Tommy, I kept talking to Mi-Ryong: “How much has he been drinking?” I asked. “He’s blitzed, right?”

She giggled some more.

“Sweet Thang wants to have your baaabies,” Tommy continued.

“Do you think we should get him a cab?” I said. “I mean, he’s so plastered he’s delusional.”

Mi-Ryong, though still giggling, was starting to look uncomfortable, so I turned to Tommy.

“I’m going to go get a beer now,” I said. “And if you don’t cut this out by the time I get back, I’m going to get some of the rougher guys in this bar to reprise Brokeback Mountain on you. And I’m not talking about the scene in the tent.”

I went to the taps, casting a fleeting look around to see if Sweet Thang was elsewhere in the bar. She wasn’t. I ordered a Yuengling and scanned to the left. No Sweet Thang. I got my beer, tossed down a fiver-more than enough for a drink and a tip at a place like McGovern’s-and looked to the right. Still no Sweet Thang.

I’m not sure why I cared. Shacking up with Sweet Thang qualified as a genuinely bad idea. On the Personal Destruction Scale, it ranked somewhere between riding a broken motorcycle in the rain and piloting one of those superlight airplanes that have to be assembled from a mail-order kit. I should have been thrilled that she wasn’t there, because it meant at least one of us came to our senses. And yet, being a typical guy, I still wanted to be wanted. An evening of having a lovely young creature like Sweet Thang extolling my many great features was just what the ol’ ego needed. I scanned the place one more time on my way back to the table, but no.

“You can stop looking for her,” Tommy said when I returned. “She isn’t here.”

Mi-Ryong had already shoved off, so I dropped the I-don’t-care act. There was clearly no fooling Tommy

“Where’d she go?” I asked.

“She got a phone call and all of a sudden she was in a hurry to leave,” Tommy said. “I’m guessing it was someone hotter than you. Jealous?”

“Hardly,” I said, taking a long sip on my beer.

“You should stay away from her,” Tommy said. “She’s bad news.”

“What makes you say that?”

“Gay intuition,” Tommy replied. “She just seems like she’d get a little stalkerish.”

“Right,” I said.

“Besides, Tina would cut your dick off,” he added.

“Yes, there’s that, too,” I conceded.

Tommy and I settled into a typical after-hours reporter conversation-basically talking about the various ways the business was dying and how the people running it were hastening the demise-for another beer and a half. Then Tommy, who had clubs to get to and boys to see, announced it was time to go, and I figured it was time for me to do the same.

Except, unlike Tommy, the only boy I was going to see was my cat, Deadline. He and I shared a small house with a tiny lawn in Bloomfield, one of those great northern New Jersey towns that lacks in neither population density nor attitude.

Deadline and I previously lived in Nutley, another well-lived-in New Jersey bedroom community known for its concentration of Italians and, not surprisingly, its phenomenal pizza. We enjoyed it and planned on staying for a while. Then a source of mine blew up our house-he and I had some artistic differences over my work-and Deadline and I decided we needed a change of scenery.

My Amherst friends urged me to join them in paying way too much to live in way too little space on that small island just on the other side of the Lincoln Tunnel. But I liked having a dandelion or two to pull and, besides, Deadline was scared of those big New York City rats. I had first looked for a place in Montclair, a town made trendy about fifteen or twenty years ago when a small enclave of artists and writers discovered it. Unfortunately, the stockbrokers heard it was trendy and mounted a hostile takeover, meaning a guy on a reporter’s salary could no longer dream of affording the real estate. So Bloomfield it was.

Deadline was asleep in my bed by the time I got home, so I tiptoed in, careful not to wake him. If he doesn’t get his twenty-two hours of shut-eye a day, he gets ornery. I read the new Michael Connelly on my nightstand until the other side of midnight, when I finally wrenched it out of my hands. I was just drifting off, or at least it felt that way, when suddenly my cell phone was ringing.

I looked at my clock. Six-fourteen A.M. What kind of sick, depraved, thoughtless person calls a reporter at 6:14 A.M.?

I looked at my cell phone. “Thang, Sweet,” it said.

“Hello?”

“It’s gone,” Sweet Thang sobbed. “My necklaces, my bracelet, my earrings, my jewelry box, it’s all gone.”

At first, Primo paid little attention to the ancillary service industries that coexisted alongside his. He fixed up houses. That was enough.

But after a few years, as he began doing the development side of the business by rote, he became increasingly aware of-and annoyed by-the people making money off his hard work: the real estate agents taking their six percent, straight off the top; the lawyers with their exorbitant hourly rates; the title searchers, appraisers, and home inspectors, each charging their ridiculous fees; the mortgage brokers with their commissions, which became even richer with the more exotic subprime loans.

Parasites, all of them. Primo did the work. Primo took the risk. Primo made the sacrifices. All so they could get fat?

No more, Primo decided. He was not going to let those untold thousands of dollars slip away with every house he built. So, much like the robber barons of the nineteenth century, who expanded their businesses vertically until they controlled every aspect of production, Primo began spreading his reach.

He opened a real estate agency and gave it all his listings. He lured some young lawyers away from their firms and paid the start-up costs for them to hang out their own shingle-in exchange, of course, for a healthy kickback on all the business he sent them. He founded a title search company, a home inspection agency, an appraisal business, a mortgage brokerage. He even opened his own pest control business, because state rules required a house be certified termite-free before a certificate of occupancy was issued.

Primo did it all. He was a complete, one-stop shop for home purchasing. His customers, who were eager to jump into the late 1990s/early 2000s real estate market and start making easy money, were thrilled he streamlined it for them. They happily shuffled from one link in Primo’s chain to the next, and Primo profited at every stop.

It made the whole system so simple to manipulate. After Primo fixed up some dilapidated dump, he’d recruit some greedy-yet-naive investor and put him through the system. Primo’s real estate agents would make the house seem like a steal-the myth of the old lady who lived there forty years and meticulously maintained it was a favorite. His appraisers would inflate the price using bogus comparables and a generous tape measure. His mortgage brokers were trained in the art of fudging a loan application, overstating the buyer’s wages and rental income, and then selling the buyer on some dreadful subprime loan with a sweetheart introductory rate that made it all seem affordable.

And then the lawyers would tie a neat bow around the whole package. Each house was rehabbed and sold by a different limited liability company, or LLC. Each service enterprise was fronted by a different LLC as well. Primo had so many different LLCs-all with different postal addresses, all with fictitious names as their corporate agent-it was sometimes hard just to come up with new names for them.